the circus, continued

August 17, 2008

Today I drive both of my
kids to camp, where they’ll stay for five days. The weather is
resplendent—perfect for opening day. A year ago when I dropped them at this
same camp, it was the first time my youngest had been away from me for so long;
of course it was only me who suffered. I couldn’t sleep for the first few
nights, imagining him in his little cabin pining away in tears.

This time they’ll fold into
the waiting scene seamlessly, and the counselors will smile at my reluctance to
leave, and I’ll drive home and start getting ready for our vacation.

The day after they come home
from camp, we leave for the island we go to every summer. Friends are joining
us this time, including an ethereally beautiful 13-year old girl, who my children have never met, who will no
doubt beguile my unsuspecting older son past all help and redemption. She loves
to cook, which will enchant my youngest. My friend being with me will help, will let me keep working
through my sadness, because she’s good at that. And she loves the island we’re
going to.

(Because it must just be sadness and loneliness
that infuses the world with such intense sensation for me right now. The effect is
difficult to function within.)

Before the summer ends (thank God) and the fall clears away this last horrible month, I get to go home for a little while.

August 15, 2008

My laptop, which has had
several near-death drops in its past (no surprise considering the turbulence
in my last few years), quietly died today for no particular reason. Based on how it died, I
should be able to get the files off it—and that there’s a doubt doesn’t freak
me out as it would have six months ago. If they’re gone, they’re gone. I’ll
write more.

It means I have to buy a new
laptop, which should fill me with dread as well. But I know I’ll figure
something out.

It means I can’t be cuddling
with the internet all night, which should also fill me with angst. But I think
it’s for the best. I’ve got more important things to do (and, as you may have
noticed, other avenues through which to post).

Just before my little
dinosaur of an IBook drew its last breath, there wasa vicious thunderstorm over my house. I looked to the west,
from which the weather typically marches, and it was sunny. So I jumped in my
car and drove a little way until I saw a rainbow. I parked in the lot of
baseball field to watch it solidify. Every color was distinct—the green was so
brilliant. A woman was walking along the edge of the parking lot. I called to
her and pointed at the sky. At first she seemed to think I was a weirdo; she ignored me. But finally she turned and looked at the rainbow, then back to
smile at me. She hadn’t been able to see it because her umbrella was so big.

August 14, 2008

The other night—or morning—at 4:30 I woke to the sound of
someone walking up my stairs. Because it was not a logical sound for me to be
hearing, what with both of my children ASLEEP, I stayed curled in bed for a
minute trying to figure out what I was hearing. I wasn’t afraid; it wasn’t an
aggressive or stealthy tread. Just someone walking up the stairs. Then I went
across the hall and checked my sons’ bedroom: they were both under the covers.

I crawled back in my bed, figuring I had been dreaming.

That morning (actual morning, with sun shining and birds
singing) the father of my children was coming to take over so I could
go to my office. My younger child got up on his own and settled down to watch
cartoons. I waited until the usual barely-enough-time moment, and then went
upstairs to wake up my older son. I opened his shades and threw some clothes on
his bed.
He didn’t budge.

“Hey, come on,” I said. “You have about 20 minutes before
your father gets here.” I nudged his back with my knee.

Nothing. Not even a finger moved.

I looked at the devious lump of sin under his comforter.

“Are you telling me that you stayed up until 4:30 last
night?”

“Ummmm. Maybe.”

“Are you nuts? What happened to ‘I’ll come up at midnight,
Mom, I promise’?”

“Mmmm.”

“What were you doing? What were you thinking?”

“Mmmm. The time got away from me.”

He got dressed and stumbled downstairs, and I slapped a bowl
of cereal in front of him. His head rolled around on his neck and his eyes were
still closed.

“Welcome to sleep deprivation, big guy,” I said. He opened
one sleepy eye at me and then grinned. And I was lost.

I had a horrible vision of marching him out of a holding
cell in some jail, my hand steering him by his elbow. “Stop smiling,” I’ll be
snarling. And he’ll pass some cute girl on the way out and give her that grin.
And she’ll be lost too.

August 13, 2008

Everywhere I go, people say I look fabulous. Last night,
today in the supermarket, talking to a neighbor. That’s the word: fabulous. My
first instinct—which perhaps I had better continue to repress—is to bitch
slap them and snap: get a grip, I’m SUFFERING here.

It does bring me up a little short; I guess I needed to lose
10 pounds.

August 12, 2008

I had an entry here that
revealed I feel better, and talked about what I saw when I felt the worst. It
was perfectly honest, and as I wrote it, I thought, “Maybe this will help
someone who’s also feeling this way.”

But as the day went on—as
people did respond to the post in a positive way, I began to grow uncomfortable
about that much honesty, and I deleted it. And that gesture, the deleting,
reflects everything that led me to the place I was in.

I don’t need to document how
I felt, not yet, anyway. And I feel better every minute.

“You just have a broken
heart,” some people have said. That’s possible—I was in love.

August 11, 2008

I finally got some sleep. During the night, a gear that had been spinning without connecting was able to click into place. And I woke up.

For many years--more than 20 of them--I have been signing my own suffocation orders. I have been agreeing, fairly willingly, to a narrowed-down life, trying to live inside a definition of self that always ended up railing against that definition. What a man wanted me to be, I tried to be. The exchange was their love, but I never got that--and that was their limitation, not mine. So because I was cramped inside that life, I was always trying to get out. No one liked it when I would bash at the walls of that box. So I'm leaving it behind. That is a peaceful thought.

And I think about the fact that the man I'll be with in the future, when I'm ready, is walking around on the planet right now. I wonder what he's doing at this second. He has no idea how good he's got it coming.

August 10, 2008

One night when I was 15, two
girlfriends and I drove to the local hangout to drink before a school dance,
and the girls left for the dance without me. There were still a lot of cars
parked, and a lot of kids I knew lounging against fenders chugging beer, so I
drifted from group to group asking for a ride to the school gym.

A red Mustang owned by two
brothers I knew agreed to take me. Four other boys piled in the back with me;
the brothers sat up front. It didn’t make me nervous that everyone had been
drinking—no surprise. I’d been in that situation before, many times. The drive
to the gym was probably about 15 minutes—what could happen? But within a few
minutes I could see that the older brother was pissed off at someone driving
another car, and the other car was pulling up next to him, daring him to race.
We all pleaded with the driver to cool down, to stop, but his testosterone (or
maybe his Michelob) was thrumming. I was sitting on a boy’s lap, and I remember
looking down at my waist as he interlocked his fingers around it, forming a
makeshift seatbelt. There was no reasoning with the driver, and we were going
85 when the car spun out of control and hit a tree, which caused the engine to
explode.

My head was slammed so hard
against the car windshield that I got a ride in the ambulance with the two
brothers, one of whom would never walk easily again. They were both excessively
apologetic to me, though; meanwhile the EMT, also my typing teacher at school,
was protective—he held my hand, kept pressure on my bleeding head, and shushed
the brothers even though I insisted that it was ok, I wasn’t really hurt that
badly. At the hospital they stitched me up and x-rayed my skull. I had a major
concussion, but no fracture.

I was due to leave the
following morning with my father and my younger brother on a weeklong trip to
Martha’s Vineyard. My two other siblings were meeting us there, and we were all
going to spend some time together at my aunt’s house. I have no memory of the
trip to the island. For all I know, we flew.

What I do remember is waking
up as if from under the weight of a thick mattress in one of my aunt’s
bedrooms. The walls and ceiling waved gently, rippling as if in a soft wind. I
had to go to the bathroom, so I decided to get up.

Nothing happened. I tried to
move a foot, a leg, a hand. Nothing. I went back to sleep, pressed downward by
a druggy gravity.

This repeated itself for a
while. Finally someone helped me walk to the bathroom. Then I staggered back
down to the bed and slept again. That’s all I did for the entire week. I slept
sometimes 12 hours, sometimes longer. People ferried me back and forth to eat
at the table a few times. And as soon as I could I dropped back onto the bed,
sinking like a stone into a black soundless sleep. My head felt as if it
weighed a hundred pounds. I never left my aunt’s house once that week.

Meanwhile my siblings
returned from outings with tales of a giant fake shark being lugged around the
island in pieces. They kept recounting sightings of this, and as I listened, I
grew fearful that I had sustained some weird inner brain injury that was
causing hallucinations. Little did I know they were just describing Bruce, the
shark in Jaws.

A major concussion is,
literally, the result of the brain bouncing against the skull from some kind of
impact. In order to heal the brain shuts down, canceling as many orders for
activity as possible. There are lots of
studies that show a link between brain injury and a higher probability of
developing major depression later in life.

One of the professionals
trying to figure out why I feel so horrible suggested that link might be making
things worse for me. “Emotional trauma can feel like a massive bruise to the
brain,” he said. “The result can be a little like a concussion, especially if
you had a major head injury earlier in your life.”

Yesterday I slept for most
of the day, but in tiny little naps of 10 minutes or so, from which I kept
waking up into confusion. I'd yell at my dog to stop barking
to come in or go out, and then I’d fall back into sleep. Unfortunately, at
night, sleep escapes me. It slips away and hangs just out of reach. I’m like I
was that week when I was a teenager; I drift back to the couch or my bed after
only a few minutes of walking around.

My inactivity is scaring me,
and I’m not a teenager being monitored by anyone. I have kids to take care of,
and that fucking dog to deal with, and somewhere in here, I’m going to have to
go back to work.

So I keep taking the
medication, and I keep talking to anyone who’s unlucky enough to be in earshot,
sounding like an obsessive compulsive person, or someone speaking in tongues. I
tell the story, over and over. I ask what if this, what if that. I spread
everything that’s happened for the last few years out on the table and pour
over it as if it were a map.

August 09, 2008

Today I had to tell my older son that my relationship broke
up. I would live every ounce of pain from the past two weeks 10 times over if it could erase what
I saw happen on his face. There was this one awful visible moment, and then I
saw it go inward, like a shark disappearing beneath the surface.

In some ways this was more difficult than telling my kids
about the divorce, because at least they had reassurance (though they may have
doubted it then) that their relationship with their father would only change,
not end. This collateral damage is the hardest to accept.

This morning I saw a number
on my scale that I haven’t seen in 10 years (in a good way).

Today my older son comes
home; he’s been away for a week. I can’t wait to see him. He is one of my
favorite people in the whole world.

I drove again this morning,
just to drive. The sun coming up was brilliant—the air was so fresh. I realized
that I’m deeply exhausted, but better. I need one of those six-month rejuvenating vacations by the
sea people used to take (when they were probably depressed) in past centuries.
I’ve always found comfort in the ocean, that it refuses to be beaten—that in
fact, it has no interest in any battle.

August 07, 2008

I’ve driven over 12 hours in
the past 4 days. It’s given me a lot of time to think; I like to drive, and
under my wheels, to paraphrase Ted Hughes, the horizons come.

To think: I’ll get to fall
in love again. I’ll get to kiss someone for the first time; I’ll get to create
the history that becomes the lullabies in a relationship, the “And remember
when we did this, and remember when we did that.” What was lost, I’ll have all
over again. (The world rolls under my heel.)